1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to scheduling appointments and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for scheduling appointments for single location entries.
2. Description of the Background Art
There are various software systems that allow users to schedule events, manage and organize information and communicate with each other. One system is Microsoft's Outlook which is a personal information management and communications program. One feature of Outlook allows users to arrange appointments and meetings by inputting information such as the names of the participant(s) invited, the start/end time of the meeting, etc. The user arranging the appointment (e.g., meeting, conference call, etc.) is generally referred to herein as the creator.
When creating an appointment or a meeting request in Outlook, the time zone for which the creator's computer is set is used as the default time zone in which the Outlook entry will be scheduled. However, not all participants may be in the same time zone. In extreme cases, each participant may be in a separate time zone, and even the creator may be, at the scheduled time, in a time zone different from that in which the creator's computer was set when the Outlook entry was created. This disparity can cause many problems for the creator of the appointment or meeting, who must keep these time zones changes in mind when selecting the best time. For example, a participant's calendar, when accessed via the Outlook Exchange Server, may appear to the creator as open at a scheduled time. However, that may be due to the fact that the scheduled time may be outside business hours in the time zone in which the participant normally is located, making the scheduled time inappropriate for a business meeting. Likewise, the creator may miscalculate the time change for an upcoming business trip, thereby scheduling meetings at unintended scheduled times.
Present systems do not automatically account for time zone changes, many of which are otherwise unknown to the system. If the system is not aware of time zone differences because it does not track this information, then the system cannot account for the differences. The time zone difference information may only reside in the mind of the user, forcing the user to remember and correctly account for such information, if the user even has such information. Because the present systems do not account for such time zone difference information and the user may not remember or correctly account for it, errors may be made in planning Calendar events. Such errors can result in incorrectly scheduled meeting requests, for example, that may not be accepted by the invitees because of the poor timing, forcing the scheduling person to create an Updated Meeting Request. This may consume more than twice as much of the creator's time as was required for creating the first Meeting Request.